Black cloud hangs over attempt to save Kyoto treaty

TALKS intended to salvage the Kyoto treaty on man-made climate change resume on a sombre note in Bonn today after the Japanese Prime minister predicted they would fail.

Junichiro Koizumi said that Japan, which is crucial to implementing the Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions after America pulled out in March, would not decide until late October whether to ratify the treaty.

"We have yet to reach a conclusion as we are trying to seek ways to co-operate between the United States, Europe and Japan," Mr Koizumi said yesterday in a debate on the TV Asahi network.

He added: "My feeling is that no agreement will be reached in next week's [conference] to be convened in Bonn."

British officials said that there was now "questionable political will" for a deal in the next two weeks finalising the outstanding elements of the treaty among Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Matters have been helped by the replacement of Mr Prescott's then sparring partner, the French environment minister Dominique Voynet, with her fellow Green, Yves Cochet.

Officials and environment ministers from 160 countries who arrive this week, for what the Foreign Office says is the most complex global negotiation of any kind, will be confronted with a 200-page negotiating text prepared by Jan Pronk, the Dutch chairman of the talks in The Hague.

His failure to produce a text until near the end of the Hague talks was blamed for their collapse. The issues on the table are the same:

A £1 billion a year package of aid for developing countries, which are likely to be worst hit by climate change.

Financial mechanisms by which developed countries can claim credit against their country's targets for helping to bring about emission reductions outside their borders

The amount of carbon that countries are allowed to soak up in forests and soils as an alternative to emission reductions.

Compliance mechanisms - the penalties to be used against countries who do not comply with their targets.

Experts point out that, unlike other international agreements, the clock is ticking: if countries do nothing now, the closer they get to the end of the period in which they are meant to have reached their Kyoto targets, 2008-12, the harder it becomes to meet them.

Japan has close trading links with America but was upset by President Bush's rejection of the treaty drawn up in Kyoto in 1997.

America is unlikely to have finalised its own alternative proposals to the Kyoto treaty before the autumn, and Japan appears to be waiting for those before making up its mind.

British officials are trying to convince the Japanese that it would not be an "unfriendly act" to ratify the Kyoto treaty without the Americans, who have signalled that they cannot meet the targets enshrined in the treaty but are not going to veto it coming into force.

China is expected to try to embarrass America this week by publishing a report suggesting that it has cut its emissions responsible for warming the atmosphere by 17 per cent over the past five years, by switching from coals to gas.

European countries have persuaded China to publish the report to rebut one of the criticisms President Bush made when he pulled out of the Kyoto climate treaty, namely that major developing countries in competition with America, such as China, are not making reductions.